Partners for Growth’s EUR 34.2m funding round into UK-based CapRelease is a clear signal that revenue-linked, data-driven capital is moving from niche fintech product to core infrastructure for ecommerce.
The growth investor is backing CapRelease’s model of providing flexible funding to ecommerce businesses, marketplaces and digital brands, using real-time trading data rather than traditional collateral or personal guarantees. The fresh capital – a mix of debt and equity according to the company – will be used to scale its lending capacity and broaden its product suite.
Betting on ecommerce’s data exhaust
The thesis is straightforward: UK ecommerce is large, growing and increasingly instrumented. The market reached around £177bn in 2024 with online penetration at roughly 30% of total retail sales, and multiple forecasts put 2025 market size in the £286bn–£353.5bn range. That volume of digital trade produces exactly the kind of granular, real-time data that alternative lenders like CapRelease need to underwrite risk at speed.
Mobile commerce is amplifying this trend. Smartphones are expected to account for over USD 100bn in 2025 transactions and around 55% of total online transaction value, as retailers push app-based journeys that deliver 1.5x higher conversion rates and 15% higher average order values than mobile web. Every tap, search and checkout event feeds into the data pipes that allow revenue-based financiers to calibrate limits, pricing and repayment schedules in near real time.
CapRelease’s proposition sits squarely in this slipstream: plug into sales, payment and marketplace systems, monitor performance continuously, and recycle repayments automatically as a share of future revenues. For ecommerce operators, the attraction is capital that flexes with trading conditions, rather than fixed amortisation schedules that can bite when demand softens.
B2B ecommerce makes this more than a retail play
The deal is not just a consumer ecommerce story. B2B ecommerce in the UK is projected to grow at around 24.5% CAGR through 2030, outpacing overall ecommerce as corporate buyers migrate to self-service procurement platforms. Those platforms face the same working-capital and inventory financing frictions as D2C brands – but at higher average ticket sizes and with more complex purchase cycles.
CapRelease’s data-led model is well suited to that segment. B2B marketplaces and SaaS-enabled distributors generate rich, structured datasets across order books, repeat purchasing and payment behaviour. That gives lenders a more reliable basis for underwriting than static financial statements, particularly for mid-market businesses that are scaling rapidly but remain capital constrained.
For Partners for Growth, the EUR 34.2m commitment buys exposure to this structural shift without having to pick individual ecommerce winners. The risk is diversified across a portfolio of borrowers, while the underwriting edge rests on CapRelease’s ability to harness AI and machine learning to interpret trading data.
AI-driven underwriting moves centre stage
The investment also reflects growing confidence in AI-enabled credit assessment. Deloitte analysis shows AI-powered personalisation in retail can deliver 28% conversion rate improvements and 34% reductions in customer acquisition costs. The same underlying capabilities – ingesting large behavioural datasets, spotting patterns and predicting outcomes – are increasingly being applied to credit risk.
As mobile commerce platforms roll out voice search, haptic feedback and camera-based sizing tools, they compress discovery and checkout into fewer, richer interactions. For lenders plugged into these systems, the result is a denser stream of operational data: product-level sell-through, cohort behaviour, returns profiles and seasonality become visible in near real time.
CapRelease’s ability to translate that data into dynamic credit decisions is the core asset Partners for Growth is backing. The mid-market focus is key: businesses seeking EUR 10–500m in flexible capital are often too large for pure-play SME fintechs but under-served by banks whose models still lean on historic accounts and hard collateral.
What this signals for mid-market financing
- Revenue-based models are institutionalising. A EUR 34.2m round from a specialist growth investor shows that revenue-linked financing is now being capitalised at scale, not just via small venture cheques.
- Data connectivity is the new collateral. For digital-first businesses, live integrations into carts, payment gateways and marketplaces are increasingly as important as physical assets when accessing capital.
- Sector-specialist lenders are gaining ground. As ecommerce and B2B marketplaces mature, lenders that understand unit economics, cohort dynamics and platform risk are positioned to displace more generalist credit providers in the EUR 10–500m bracket.
Execution risk remains. CapRelease must prove it can manage credit quality through a full cycle, particularly if consumer demand softens or B2B buyers tighten budgets. But the structural tailwinds – sustained ecommerce growth, the rise of B2B platforms and the maturation of AI-driven underwriting – are firmly in its favour.
For the UK and wider European mid-market, Partners for Growth’s backing of CapRelease is a strong marker: the next phase of ecommerce expansion will be financed not by traditional bank overdrafts, but by specialist platforms wired directly into the data exhaust of digital trade.